Semantics and pragmatics PPT

What is pragmatics ppt final

2. What is pragmatics? &#x2022; "We human beings are odd compared with our nearest animal relatives. Unlike them, we can say what we &#x2022; want, when we want. All normal humans can produce and understand any number of new words and &#x2022; sentences. Humans use the multiple options of language often without thinking. But blindly, they sometimes &#x2022; fall into its traps. They are like spiders who exploit their webs, but themselves get caught in the sticky &#x2022; strands"

3. Definition Jean Aitchison: &#x2022; Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others. &#x2022; Systematic study of meaning by virtue of the use of language. &#x2022; Central topics are implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis.

4. A brief history of pragmatics &#x2022; Origin goes back to the philosophy of language around the 1930&#x2019;s : Charles Morris, Rudolph Carnap, Charles Peirce. &#x2022; Peirce divided semiotics into syntax (study of formal relation of signs to each other) semantics (relation of signs to what they denote) and pragmatics (relation of signs to their users and interpreters). Carnap arranges them by their level of abstractness; he says syntax is the most abstract followed by semantics and pragmatics at the end.

5. Conti&#x2026;&#x2026;. &#x2022; In the 1950s the school of ideal language philosophy was concerned with the study of logical systems of artificial/formal language which resulted in the development of nowadays formal semantics. Another school of thought was the ordinary language school. It argued to concentrate on the natural language, for example Austin&#x2019;s theory of speech acts or Grice&#x2019;s conversational implicature was set in this environment.

6. Conti&#x2026;&#x2026;. &#x2022; about 20 years later, the late 1960s and early 1970&#x2019;s, Noam Chomsky&#x2019;s followers spoke up against an abstract language view and achieved with their campaign the emptying of the&#x201C;pragmatic wastebasket&#x201D; as Yeoshua Bar-Hillel put it. Concretely this meant that a lot of research was done in the 1970s by linguists to get order into the linguistic theories.

7. Why pragmatics? &#x2022; Just taking a sentence in a literally way won&#x2019;t give us all the facts of meaning it has, the proposition which is made by uttering a sentence is to be seen in context with for example physical behavior, background assumptions, real-world...

There are an awful lot of things in this country that I think would be...

It's Interesting...

Keith Allan, FAHA (born 27 March 1943) is an Australian linguist and Emeritus Professor at Monash University.
Allan sees language as a form of social interactive behavior and believes this to be an important consideration in any thorough account of meaning in natural language. While he is interested in all aspects of meaning in language, his...

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@mbindwane @WaylanderMR @maggsnaidu @alpheusb @De_Imperial silly semantics can change the meaning of a sentence. Unsure you have law degree?
Wed, 24 June 2015 11:33 AM